The benefits of storing data in the cloud are clear. However, as businesses are beginning to closely examine what having data in the cloud entails, they’re discovering that their relationships with cloud vendors are sometimes, well, cloudy.
In a 2015 Forrester Consulting survey, more than 60% of businesses said issues with transparency were stalling further expansion into the cloud. These organisations are justified in being wary, because knowing where data is going and how it is being treated is paramount.
I’ll explain why the next wave of successful cloud providers will compete on these issues rather than price, product or market.
Why is location important?
If backups are vaulted in the wrong geographic location, businesses limit their ability to rebound from an incident within the necessary recovery time objectives (RTOs), due to latency concerns and bandwidth cost. The goal of strategically selecting where data will be vaulted is to minimise organisational risk as much as possible. To achieve this goal, businesses need to have two separate RTOs in place for operational issues that are specific to the individual environment (such as a server outage), and regional disasters.
A business would likely require a lower RTO for an operational issue, which would allow for local data vaulting, whereas a regional disaster could either have an equal or less aggressive RTO, simply because customers view events affecting several providers in a given area differently to an event affecting a single entity only. Unfortunately, many organisations focus solely on addressing operational RTOs in the disaster recovery (DR) planning process, which is catastrophic in a widespread event.
One of the benefits of the cloud is that it allows businesses to achieve a solution that addresses both operational and DR RTOs – they just need to know where the cloud’s data centres terminate. The important thing is to have their data as close as possible, but far enough away to ensure there’s not a common risk between geographies. The further apart locations are, the more availability and recovery challenges there are – and of course cost and latency (affecting communications, user experience, and so on).
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